Corroboree frog making comeback in Kosciuszko National Park

A threatened Australian frog species placed in a quarantined enclosure in the Kosciuszko National Park a year ago is making a comeback.

The New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage says it has released a further 150 Southern Corroboree Frog eggs into a second enclosure in the park this week.

Senior threatened species officer, David Hunter, says an introduced pathogen will wipe out the frogs if nothing is done to protect them.

But he says the project appears to be working.

“So a year on from the first enclosure that we built and put frogs and eggs into, we're seeing very positive signs that the frogs are really happy with their new environment,” Mr Hunter said.

“In fact, so happy that the eggs are now one-year-old little frogs that are growing really strongly and the adults that we put into the enclosure successfully bred and produced viable eggs themselves.”

Mr Hunter says the Corroboree is Australia's best known frog species.

“In the 1960s, a researcher concluded that Corroboree Frogs formed the greatest vertebrate biomass in that system,” he said.

“So, if you got all the Corroboree Frogs and put them into a ball, that ball would have been bigger than a ball of wombats, or wallabies or possums or anything else.

“They really were in such huge abundance that they would have been playing an important part of the ecosystem function of those systems.”